While the Harvey Weinstein case and the MeToo movement took the West by storm last October, it barely caused a ripple in Japan — sex sells here, but frank talk about its dark side is less common. There is a common misconception that dating someone gives you a fast pass into the bedroom, when in reality, the vast majority of sexual assault victims know the perpetrator. Rape is about power. To make things crystal clear, you can add extra emphasis to the verb by inserting a variety of suffixes. Although this form can commonly be heard by a mother scolding her child, it can pack a punch between adults too. It is also the responsibility of the more dominant party to make sure their partner is consenting. Are you sure?
TOKYO (10 p.m.)
more on this story
Selena Hoy joins the crowd. For centuries, Kanayama has been a place where couples pray for fertility and marital harmony; during the Edo era, from the 17th to 19th centuries, sex workers would come and pray to be rid of the STIs that they picked up in the course of the job. There was even a festival revolving around fertility and sexual health during those times — but the tradition was lost in the late s. In the s, then-chief priest Hirohiko Nakamura decided to resurrect it. But since then, the festival has morphed into what it is today: a joyful and blatant celebration of the penis in this usually more circumspect country.
Popular Searches
A i Aoyama is a sex and relationship counsellor who works out of her narrow three-storey home on a Tokyo back street. Her first name means "love" in Japanese, and is a keepsake from her earlier days as a professional dominatrix. Back then, about 15 years ago, she was Queen Ai, or Queen Love, and she did "all the usual things" like tying people up and dripping hot wax on their nipples. Her work today, she says, is far more challenging. Aoyama, 52, is trying to cure what Japan's media calls sekkusu shinai shokogun , or "celibacy syndrome". Japan's unders appear to be losing interest in conventional relationships. Millions aren't even dating, and increasing numbers can't be bothered with sex. For their government, "celibacy syndrome" is part of a looming national catastrophe. Japan already has one of the world's lowest birth rates. Its population of million , which has been shrinking for the past decade, is projected to plunge a further one-third by
A demonstration demanding universal suffrage immediately to be held on Kigensetsu, the great national holiday, under the leadership of the Kenseikai, Kokuminto and the Universal Suffrage Society, promises to be one of the greatest of the kind ever seen in Japan. Forty-three organizations in Tokyo made an agreement recently to take united action to support the suffrage movement. Members of all these organizations are expected to take a prominent part in the mammoth parade on the Kigensetsu holiday. This is our warning. With its ears pricked high a brown mongrel dashes out to meet every incoming plane but only to return with its ears hanging low. This is the routine taken up and still being continued by a young brown dog that recently strayed into this air base to be adopted by a noncommissioned officer who one day took off on a mission to intercept enemy B raiders and has not yet returned. Immediately the noncommissioned officer took the dog into his care.
